IAM1585 – Author and CEO Helps Clients Get Better in Communicating Authentically

Lee Caraher is the CEO of Double Forte PR & Digital Marketing; she’s known for her practical solutions to big problems. Lee is the author of Millennials & Management based on her experience with failing and then
succeeding at retaining Millennials. Her second book, The Boomerang Principle was published in April 2017.

• CEO Story: Lee started her business in 2002 out of necessity. She needs more flexibility in her time for her younger son and more time to be with her mother who was diagnosed with lung cancer. And so, Lee has to be her own boss. Created her own forte out of her own need.
• Business Service: Public relations, digital marketing, and influencing firms.
• Secret Sauce: Most are in-house. Super pragmatic – focused on business.
• CEO Hack: Audible for listening to audiobooks
• CEO Nugget: Trust yourself and have confidence (2) Our words have a heavier weight and should be used for good (3) Be self-aware
• CEO Defined: Having a lot of attention to what's going on in your team and with your clients

Website: www.double-forte.com , www.leecaraher.com

Twitter: leecaraher
Instagram: leecaraher
Facebook: LeeCaraher1
LinkedIn: leecaraher

Episode Link: https://iamceo.co/2019/01/09/iam149-author-and-ceo-helps-clients-get-better-in-communicating-authentically/

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Transcription

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00:22 – Intro

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkness values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

00:47 – Gresham Harkless

Hello, this is Gresh from the I AM CEO Podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Lee Carraher of Double Forte PR and Digital Marketing. Lee, it is awesome to have you on the show.

00:59 – Lee Caraher

Gresh. I am so looking forward to talking with you today.

01:02 – Gresham Harkless

I am looking forward to it. What I want to do is just read a little bit more about Lee so you can hear about all the awesome things that she's doing. Lee is the CEO of Double Forte PR and Digital Marketing. She's known for her practical solutions to big problems. Lee is the author of Millennials in Management, based on her experience with failing and then succeeding at retaining Millennials. Her second book, the Boomerang Principle, was published in April 2017. Lee, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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01:30 – Lee Caraher

I am ready.

01:31 – Gresham Harkless

All right, let's do it. So the first question I had was to hear a little bit more about your CEO story and what led you to start your business.

01:37 – Lee Caraher

So I started my business in 2002, so 16 years ago, which seems like yesterday in some ways and like eons ago in other ways. I actually wasn't intending to be an entrepreneur CEO with my own business, but basically life got in the way of that. Between my younger son, who has special needs and requires a lot more flexibility in my calendar and my schedule than a traditional job, even in high leadership, would do, and the fact that my mother was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer in 2002, and I had decided I was going to be with my mom and my dad while she was sick.

I live in California, she lives in Wisconsin. It was very clear to me between those two things that I had to be my own boss because I would have to if I'd taken the jobs that I was looking to take, I would have not been able to go to Wisconsin, which was not an option. So basically I created Double Forte out of my own need and haven't really looked back since.

02:36 – Gresham Harkless

That makes perfect sense. Obviously sorry to hear that about your mom especially. But it's always interesting how sometimes circumstances, the universe, whatever, pushes us in the direction of whether or not we want to go there. Puts us on the right path, and works out that way.

02:51 – Lee Caraher

So true. I've had very large, high-profile senior leadership positions. The two jobs before when I started my company and I just had sort of never thought about it. Then, voila. I'm the breadwinner in our house, so I had to bring home some bread. There you go.

03:07 – Gresham Harkless

Part of the job, unfortunately. Or unfortunately, it seems.

03:11 – Lee Caraher

Exactly.

03:12 – Gresham Harkless

Now I wanted to hear, I guess, a little bit more about Double Forte and hear what you guys are doing. How are you serving the clients that you're working with?

03:18 – Lee Caraher

Sure. So Double Forte, like you said, it's a public relations, digital marketing, and influencer marketing firm. We're based in San Francisco. We have a big office in New York. Well, when I say big, it's. We're independent and we got like 30-something people. We're intentionally small. We serve clients in sort of three broad categories. One is consumer lifestyle, food, and bev, health and wellness, sports and fitness accessories, digital life, video games, Mr. Arkansas VR apps, and then professional services.

Organizations and companies that serve other professionals. What we do for them is our job is to help our clients get better through communication. We believe that everything good comes from great communication. Great leadership, great engagement, and great customer relationships come from great communication. However we can help our clients in those spaces, we will. So sometimes it's working with internal people with the CEO and their HR people. Are they communicating with their employees? Do they understand?

Sometimes it's doing media relations and analyst relations and making sure that those people who are reporting about different categories know who our client is and what they're about and all that kind of stuff. Sometimes it's in social media, making sure that how people, companies, and people portray themselves on social media is authentic and real and that they're. They're engaging in a very positive, authentic.

04:43 – Gresham Harkless

Way that makes perfect sense. Now I wanted to ask you for what I call your secret sauce. This could be like your differentiator. What you feel kind of sets either you or Double Forte apart from everyone.

04:53- Lee Caraher

Else, I think from a differentiator point of view. So my agency there are lots of agencies in San Francisco and New York, and we differentiate ourselves on a couple of things. One is that most of us have been in-house, meaning I have been the client. When you've been a client served, I think you serve better because there's a reason agencies get hired is that is to take some weight off the people who are working for the company. If the agencies don't have that point of view that we're here to serve, they're here to lift the weight off your shoulders.

Agencies can be more trouble than they're worth. We aim to be the easiest agency to work with. That brings positive value all the time. We can do that because we have a different point of view. That's number one. Number two is that we're super pragmatic. Sometimes we lose in competitive pitches because it's not very sexy or sizzly. Probably half of the time when we lose because of that, people come back around to us later and say, oh, I wish you hadn't spent all that money on that stuff.

We're very pragmatic because we're very focused on the business. You can be super busy in PR and communication and social media and get nowhere, and we will not do those kinds of activities that just have a flash agenda instead of a business agenda. I think those are the things that differentiate us between us and our competitors in the space.

06:16 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, I love that. I can imagine myself just hearing people sitting in restaurants or creating something, and they're the consumer, and they're like, I can do such a better job of doing X, Y, and Z, whether it be making whatever or creating whatever product. It kind of sounds like that's what also laid the foundation of Double Forte because you guys, as you being a consumer, you've been able to kind of create something. I love the pragmatic aspect as well because it gets down to the nuts and bolts so that you're able to do what you're actually hoping to do. Not all the smoke and mirror. Sometimes that happens.

06:45- Lee Caraher

Yeah, Well, I think PR in general, social media, for the people who don't do it, it seems really simple, like, oh, just make a phone call or put something on Instagram, and frankly, some of the smartest people I know in the world do what we do for a living. Some of the dumbest people I know, in the world, do what we do for a living. I don't know how good their living is, but in general, I live to be frictionless.

The more we can do things that advance our client's business goals, the more we're gonna be valuable to them, and how it pays off for us is I'm really proud of the fact that most of our clients have been with us longest. We're 16 years old. Our longest client has been with us for 12 years. Our shortest, well, we just signed the client last week, but you know what I mean. Our average client engagement is over five and a half years, which is two times the national average for agencies. So from my perspective, that means we're doing something good.

07:44 – Gresham Harkless

Absolutely. Yeah. That secret sauce is working well, it sounds like. So that's great to hear that you guys have that long-term type of client relationship that you've had from your clients and stuff. So now I wanted to switch gears a little bit and, and ask you for what I call a CEO hack. This might be an app, a book, or a habit that you have, but it's something that makes you more effective and efficient as a business owner.

08:05 – Lee Caraher

I think audible makes me more efficient. The most important thing for a CEO for leaders is to listen and to read and to get new points of view. The best leaders I know are just voracious readers looking for and don't believe they know everything. They're looking for other inputs. Because I commute sometimes, I'm driving sometimes in the train, whatever. I listen to a lot of books on Audible, on my iPhone and it's just as a time saver for me to make sure that I'm reading. My goal is to read a book a week and that lets me do it.

08:41 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Especially anybody that's especially Go, go, go, go, go and like you said, commuting or just bouncing from meeting to meeting to be able to listen to a chapter in between an appointment or something or while you're on your way to your work, whatever it is. That kind of is a phenomenal CEO hack that a lot of people could take advantage of.

08:58 – Lee Caraher

I mean, I think there's downtime and then there's. So I try, I usually have two books in play at a time and I'm trying to get a mix of what's practical and in my company, I have a book club. Every quarter I give everybody in the company three books in general. One is a skill that you need to learn, and one is an idea about what we do for a living. Then one is a different voice that we can learn from either in fiction or in nonfiction. So like this month, I gave everybody, or this quarter, I gave everybody seven habits for highly effective people. Is there any that's like a standard and. But I realized if you haven't read it, you haven't read it. You have to read it.

09:42 – Gresham Harkless

Right.

09:43 – Lee Caraher

Then a book by Jay Baer and then another book. When I have those so myself, I always have something that is a different voice and something that's really, like work-related, like how-to stuff. When I'm in audio form, I listen to the things that are different voices, not the things where I have to take lots of notes. Although I do find that I'm like, oh, I want to quote that. Oh my God, that's so good. I have to go back. I usually get the book in audible form and either in paper or in Kindle form. So I'm going back and forth between the two.

10:13 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, that's funny. I do the exact same thing because I always find it so hard to get the quote. Oh, that's an amazing gem that I just heard from the book. Now I have to find out how to save this so that I can share it and keep it.

10:25 – Lee Caraher

Exactly.

10:27 – Gresham Harkless

But that's absolutely awesome that obviously you do that, but you also do that for your team. Especially I love the out-of-the-box type thing. So it might be fiction, it might be nonfiction, but something that gives you that different perspective, which I'm sure translates into all the work that you guys do. Now, I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO nugget. You might have already touched on it, but do you have a word of wisdom or piece of advice, or if you could hop into a time machine, what would you tell your younger business self?

10:51 – Lee Caraher

Oh, my gosh. What would I tell my younger business self is to trust yourself. Trust yourself more. I think a lot of us have imposter syndrome. Even though here we are CEOs, we run companies, people work for us. Then I get together with CEOs, women, and men who go, do you believe they follow us? So I think more about trusting ourselves.

More around trusting ourselves. If I had trusted, I mean, I do trust myself and I have a lot of confidence. I think the trade-off or the dichotomy is how you have a healthy ego and listen to imposter syndrome all at the same time. I think my name is CEO and I think I would have wasted less time charting my own course if I had trusted myself more.

11:34- Gresham Harkless

There you go. Yeah, that's definitely a good reminder. Sometimes you think that I always say if you're a trailblazer or an innovator, sometimes you're not quote-unquote, leading people because it might be so far aligned. But if you continue to go your path, then all of a sudden you turn around and you are leading a bunch of.

11:50 – Lee Caraher

Yeah, and you never know. I think particularly with social, I mean, I have had really huge, at my last job, I had over 700 people. The job before that I had over 650 people. This job, I have 30-something people in this company. But you never know who's listening to you as a leader. You never know. You're always going to have an impact. I was in the, literally, I was in the airport the other day coming home from New York and this person who had worked in my team 20 years ago, that's how old I am.

Oh my gosh, 20 years ago, came up to me and I started, recognized the face, but I was like trying to place this face and he said I'm so I'm Jack, whatever, and I worked for you at this company and you said this thing when we had this really crappy day and you said this thing. That has stayed with me forever.

I don't have a clue what I said to this man, but it really sort of brought home to me, and reminded me that we have great responses, and responsibility, when we're leaders as well. When we're trailing blazing new trails or people are counting on us, our words have a heavier weight and they can be used for good or for evil. The more we can use them for good, the better it is.

13:03 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. A lot of times, like when you're authentic and in alignment, when you show up that way and everything, no matter where you're at like you said, you can have that influence that somebody 20 years later can say, oh, I remember when you said X, Y, and Z and that change my life or something like that.

13:17 – Lee Caraher

It was like another day. So I mean, which sounds really like  I understand how flippant that sounds, but I don't mean it to be flippant. I just mean it to be purposeful.

13:26 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, well, no, it makes sense like you said, because you never know like what that thing might be everything to somebody else. So sometimes it may not be the same to you, but at the same time it may influence everybody. So that's why it's so important to kind of understand the platform. We all have.

13:40 – Lee Caraher

I think I'm going to add a hack though. Can I add a hack?

13:43 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely.

13:44 – Lee Caraher

The other hack is to know yourself. The most important thing I think for leaders is to be self-aware, right? The more self-aware we are, the more confident we can be and the better we can be at who we are. We all know that leader who thinks they're the greatest ping pong player since whoever, right? Since Forrest Gump. They're not, or they think they're the best writer and they're terrible.

But being self-aware, having, getting real input, doing a 360 on yourself, which is so hard to do when you're the boss, right? How do you get a 360? Hiring a coach so they can do it for you, whatever it is taking. I really like different personality tests and assessments and some of them are for me less valuable than others. But the more I can understand myself and how people might be viewing me, the better leader I can be. So that's my other hack.

14:38 – Gresham Harkless

I love that. Great reminder. Now I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. We're hoping to have different quote-unquote CEOs on the show. So Lee, what does being a CEO mean to you?

14:50 – Lee Caraher

Being a CEO means that I'm getting I live in a high input, low democracy framework, which means that I am paying lots and lots of attention to what's going on in the marketplace, to the people who work for me, and to the customers that we have. I'm charting a course forward for all of those constituencies based on what I'm listening to and how I'm reasoning it all out. Then I am doing it in a compelling enough way that people come along with me to make it happen.

15:19 – Gresham Harkless

Love that. Definitely a great reminder. Lee, I truly appreciate you for taking some time out of your schedule. What I wanted to do is pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional you can let our readers and our listeners know and then of course how best people can get a hold of you and get copies of your book.

15:32 – Lee Caraher

Oh well, the best place to get hold of me is on my website leecaraher.com l e e c a r a h e r.com you get to my agency Double Forte. From there you can find my books which are also on Amazon and anywhere else you can buy a book. So the Boomerang Principle and Millennials in Management. My blog is there too and you can find me on Twitter at Leighkaran and Instagram. I think I would just say in closing if communication is the key to leadership and the key to marketing and the key to relationships, the more you can understand yourself and how you communicate, if it's effective or not, the more effective and less friction you'll have in your day.

16:11 – Gresham Harkless

That makes perfect sense and that's an absolutely great reminder we'll make sure to have those links as well in the show notes just so that you can follow up with you Lee. But again, I truly appreciate you and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

16:21 – Lee Caraher

Thank you so much, Gresh.

16:25 – Outro

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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